There are increasingly more industrial, medical, scientific, and engineering applications requiring image processing of two dimensional, three dimensional, and multidimensional data. In the industrial area, semiconductor wafer inspection and liquid crystal display, LCD, inspection requires high speed two or three dimensional image processing. Examples include the confocal microscope and other imagers. In the medical area, digital three dimension imaging equipment is widely available in hospitals to provide non-invasive imaging of body structure and function. This equipment requires high speed image processing.
Due to the increasingly lower cost and higher speed of video consumer electronics and digital electronic hardware, the current computer image processing technology advances rapidly. Fast processing speed coupled with cheap memory, a high speed bus, and a parallel architecture make many of the computationally demanding two-dimensional imaging applications cost-effective. However, in the arena of multidimensional imaging, cost-effective machines are still not available. Furthermore, the drive by semiconductor manufacturers to smaller feature sizes, and the drive by liquid crystal display manufactures to larger panel sizes, continues to place great demands on cost-effective two-dimensional image processing systems. These systems need to meet the ever increasing data volume required for semiconductor wafer inspection and LCD inspection.
A multidimensional architecture can be as simple as a direct extension from a prior art two dimensional architecture. However, the hardware required to implement this approach increases exponentially. For example, while a 3 by 3 convolution requires 9 computational elements and two line delays in a two dimensional implementation, implementation of a 3 by 3 by 3 convolution takes 27 computational elements and two frame delays. This exponential increase in complexity prohibits cost-effective implementation of three dimension, and higher dimension, image processing algorithms in real-time applications.